Madeline Arakawa Gins, Visionary Architect, Is Dead at 72

ART & DESIGN

By MARGALIT FOX

Madeline Arakawa Gins and her husband, the Japanese-born artist known simply as Arakawa, in 2008. Eric Striffler for The New York Times

Madeline Arakawa Gins, a poet-turned-painter-turned-architect who publicly forswore mortality — and whose buildings, by her own account, were designed to pre-empt death for those living in them — died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. She was 72.

The cause was cancer, said Joke Post, the manager for architectural projects at the Reversible Destiny Foundation, which Ms. Gins and her husband, the Japanese-born artist known simply as Arakawa, established in 1987.

With her husband, with whom she collaborated for nearly half a century, Ms. Gins practiced an idiosyncratic and highly personal brand of art that sought to deploy architecture in the service of large essential questions about the nature of being.

The couple’s vision, as articulated in their published writings and their buildings, was beyond Utopian. It sought not merely better living — but, ideally, eternal living — through design.

Their work was underpinned by a philosophy they called Reversible Destiny. Its chief tenet, as the catalog of a 1997 joint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo put it, was, “Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die.”

Ms. Gins and her husband, a protégé of Marcel Duchamp, shared a philosophy of art and life they called "Reversible Destiny." One of its manifestations is this house in East Hampton, their first in the United States, called the Bioscleave House. Eric Striffler for The New York Times

Eluding death through design could be accomplished, the couple believed, through a literal architecture of instability — a built environment in which no surface is level, no corner true, no line plumb.

These principles were riotously manifest in what is almost certainly their best-known project, Reversible Destiny Lofts-Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller), a residential complex of vibrantly colored stacked pods they built in a Tokyo suburb in 2005.

As Newsweek described the project that year: “Each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.”

In making such rigorous accommodations to their rigorous accommodations, the couple believed, residents would sharpen themselves neurologically and derive corresponding physical and mental benefits. By living this way, they maintained, it was possible to stave off the stagnation — and even the inevitable death — that living in rote comfort can bring.

Madeline Helen Gins (her surname is pronounced with a hard “g”) was born in New York City on Nov. 7, 1941, and reared in Island Park, N.Y. In 1962 she earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, where she studied physics and Eastern philosophy. She later studied painting and began her working life as a poet.

The artists completed nine "reversible destiny" loft-style apartments in Mitaka, Japan, after competing for the commission. Masatako Nakano

Her first published book, the experimental novel “Word Rain (or, A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says),” appeared in 1969.

Ms. Gins began collaborating with Arakawa, a protégé of Marcel Duchamp, in the early 1960s and married him not long afterward. The couple’s first major collaboration, “The Mechanism of Meaning” — a vast installation of immense canvases featuring found objects and aphoristic text — has been exhibited worldwide.

Their other architectural work includes Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), a private home in East Hampton, N.Y., on Long Island.

Completed in 2008, the house features walls of more than three dozen different colors and an undulating, dunelike floor whose steep swells, Ms. Gins told The New York Times that year, seem to embody the couple’s most basic imperative: “to reverse the downhill course of human life.”

A longtime resident of Manhattan, Ms. Gins is survived by a brother, Stephen.

Arakawa died in 2010.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/arts/design/madeline-arakawa-gins-visionary-architect-dies-at-72.html?_r=0